


Go Slow, My Soul, To Feed Thyself

by MercuryGray



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: F/M, First Kiss, Introspection, Not A Fix-It, Slow Burn, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-15
Updated: 2017-02-15
Packaged: 2018-09-24 16:22:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9770153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercuryGray/pseuds/MercuryGray
Summary: (Post 2.04, spoilers.) In the aftermath of their trip to retrieve the wounded soldiers at Chantilly, Emma considers Henry and what might have been.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Go slow, my soul, to feed thyself  
> Upon his rare approach –  
> Go rapid, lest Competing Death  
> Prevail upon the Coach –  
> Go timid, should his final eye  
> Determine thee amiss –  
> Go boldly – for thou paid'st his price  
> Redemption – for a Kiss –  
> -Emily Dickinson

Hell hath no fury like a mother disobeyed.

 

Jane Green had a torrent of invective for her eldest daughter, coming into the house after being gone two days without a note, or even the vague approval of the supervisors of the hospital - gone, it now appeared, without even a  _ chaperone,  _ sleeping outside and unsheltered in the company of men, of... of  _ soldiers!  _ Of _ Yankee soldiers!  _ Of having gone to a  _ battlefield,  _ which was no place for women, to tend men wounded  _ God knows where  _ and _ in what ways…. _

 

On and on it went. It had been a long while since her mother had vocalized her disapproval of her daughter’s nursing, but this had been reason enough for her to do it, and now she was giving voice to a full fusillade of objections and complaints.

 

Emma waited while her mother railed, too tired to argue. Yes, it was true - what she had done was wrong. On that point she could not debate. (To say nothing of the money she had stolen to do it, but if her mother did not already know about it she was not about to add to her list of transgressions.) But surely -  _ surely -  _  her small evil was outweighed by the good that had been accomplished! Twenty men getting hospital care, twenty mothers who would not have to lose their sons needlessly, twenty families who would not now rest in fear not knowing where their sons had fallen.

 

But to Mrs. Green’s eyes, her daughter’s fault was still unpardonable. “Who knows what might have happened to you!” she kept exclaiming. Emma ducked her head and felt her cheeks burn at her mother’s disappointment - and her own.

 

_ Yes, who knows what might have happened?  _

 

The kiss still haunted her. How might the night have passed differently, if they hadn’t been seen, hadn’t been shot at, hadn’t been  _ interrupted.  _ Who knows what might have happened? 

 

_ And how I would have welcomed it,  _ she thought bitterly to herself.

 

When she was young and first out in society, she’d taken her lessons from her mother and her aunts about what was good and fit and proper, about what a boy should do and what a boy shouldn’t, and what a young lady could say to ward off unwanted attentions. (Of course before she’d sat through that sermon she’d been  listening for years as her cousins giggled about who’d caught whom behind the ferns, and who’d walked out to the garden, and who’d crushed their gardenias or mussed their hair.) Between the two, the cousins seemed the smarter set to follow, and follow she did - there was no better flirt in Alexandria than Emma Green, nor a dancing partner more sought after.

 

And then came Frank - or Benjamin Franklin Stringfellow, as was, all dark eyes and sweet smiles and hair that hung just so over his eyes and gave him a kind of rakish look, like a hero out of a novel. All the girls mad on him, and he picked her. Her cousins all had married Stringfellow men, the family old and good and propertied, a plantation in the country and a house in town. Quite the catch for the daughter of James Green, who made furniture and was said to be new money. How he had made her laugh as they hid in the bushes where Belinda couldn’t find them, and made her giddy when he kissed her, and made her cry when he went off to be a soldier. (How much he and she had stretched her mother’s precepts! How often they had been the ones of whom the girls would giggle!) 

 

A child’s foolishness. She felt that now. Frank was a boy a girl could love, and she was not a girl any longer - or if she was, she tried her hardest not to be. A child saw the world in black and white, and so had she done, but now she knew the world had shades of gray. When Frank had left she’d seen the world as he did, full of knights going off to fight a valiant battle against an unworthy foe, her heart filled up with the inherent righteousness of their cause, her eyes blind to any other way of seeing.

 

Then came the hospital, and the world had not only black and white in it, but red -- and where the red washed out, the gray remained. That men were good and evil both and those called righteous sometimes did unrighteous things, and likewise those on whom no good was thought to fall could at the same turn be the holiest of men.

 

When Frank came back, a girl would have rejoiced to see her knight returned unchanged, and hung her laurels on him. But he came back, and Emma was a girl no longer.

 

She’d tried to remember what she’d loved in him before he’d left, contemplating the photograph in her dresser drawer as one might study a figure in a book, searching for a hidden meaning, but none came. She’d changed, and so had he, and not, perhaps, all to the good -- his eyes slid past hers when he spoke, his words full of double meanings and half-meant promises.  He’d never lied to her before. Or had he?

 

It scarcely signified. He’d done things she was not prepared to forgive, and she would break with him for it. Perhaps there was a childishness in that, but she could not sit by and love him when she knew what he had planned. Besides, she was too busy now for girlish parlor romances - she had work to do, and she meant to do it, and do it well. 

 

And in the bare places in her soul left by his absence, she found other flowers growing -- strange seeds she hadn’t planted. Flowers of friendship, yes, but some that, blooming, gave off sweeter smells. She hadn’t sought them out - merely turned and found them there. A helping hand in a corridor, a kindly offered word, a complaint answered and attended to, a lantern held out in the dark, a shoulder on which to rest, and weep, and mourn.

 

A hundred different little moments that sewn together offered unimaginable warmth. 

 

And when she saw what was unfolding in her heart’s garden, she did not rip it out, but let it grow, quietly wondering if she had dreamed it or if he felt the same. 

 

A girl would have asked, impertinent and impatient. A woman watched, and waited - and found her reward.

 

Her heart had leapt up in her throat when he had called the Reverend Burwell to task on the issue of slavery, and God’s commandments on the same, and she had not known, truly, if it was in anger or embarrassment or love. And when he’d confronted McBurney, and raged and paced the stairwell filled with indignation that he could do nothing for these men, she knew only that she would give him what he wanted, if only to help that hurt in his soul as he had so often soothed the hurts in hers.

 

She didn’t know what’d made her take a stand atop that wall, or what force kept her there, and sent the bullets wide. It wasn’t duty, or the righteousness of her cause, or even faith, but in her heart a kind of tide, that, rising up, roared about her ears.

 

What lion was that? What war cry from what Amazonian maid? 

 

But she had learned since beginning with her nursing that there were many things within her she did not yet have a name for. Perhaps this was but one of them.

 

Nightfall had come too quickly, and the roads, unsafe by day, were even more treacherous by night. They’d stopped and circled up the wagons, making shift with what they had, setting out pickets, gathering wood for fires, making food. The fear from earlier had left her, but she stayed by him still, going down to the stream to wash their hands, fill what canteens they had for the long road back. 

 

“If they saw what I saw, I’m quite sure they’d be proud.”

 

How warm his hand had felt around hers, how bright his eye when he looked at her! She’d been afraid to speak, afraid a noise, a movement, even, might send what was around them running for cover like a frightened animal. How could she coax it forth, let what had been unspoken speak? And then he’d said her name, in such a way that made it sound as though he’d said it thus for years, and the night was dark and filled with noise, and he was close, far closer than she’d ever found him--

 

She couldn’t say who’d started it, who’d leaned or lead or followed, only that they’d met in the place between them and all the warmth was no longer her imagining, but real and in the flesh, and she wanted to drink it up and be drunk on it. Let him blame her, if there was blame to give. Let him say later that she’d played the Jezebel and ensnared him, she didn’t much care as long as it meant he would keep kissing her!

 

Who knows what might have happened if the soldier hadn’t seen? (Her hands had hooked around his suspenders, his fingers tight around her sleeves. Her hair was already loose and his shirt was open, their entire persons in riotous disarray, pulses high and manners stretched.  _ We nearly tasted death,  _ the kiss had said.  _ Let’s drink of other, sweeter things.) _

 

But what had come next even she could not have seen.

 

Emma jerked back to the present - her mother had stopped shouting, observing her daughter with a skeptical eye. “Doubtless you’re tired,” Mrs. Green said finally.  _ Did she notice my mind was elsewhere? _   “Perhaps you ought to go to bed.”

 

“Thank you, Mama.”

 

She’d never been so glad to be alone before, to strip out of her clothes and stand before her looking glass, her dress stained with sweat and blood and the dust of the road. Each layer seemed a suit of armor all its own, wading through skirts and petticoats until, unfastening her corset, she closed her eyes and conjured him there, sitting upon her bed - shirt open, eyes bright again with praise.

 

Who knows what could have happened?

 

She’d let Frank do it, untie her gown and let down her hair and kiss her in places she did not know she needed kisses, but that had been his desire speaking then. This flame she fanned now was hers, and hers alone, and she was quite sure she would have let Henry (How good it felt to say his  _ name _ ! Henry-Henry-Henry-Henry- _ Henry!)  _ have whatever he desired of her.

 

But what he desired she did not know. 

 

The vision shifted, her bright-eyed lover gone, and in its place, the stunned, struck man who’d come out of the river soaked and shaking. He’d left her at the riverbank, going back to camp hollow-eyed and silent, too frightened of himself to speak. And she’d been frightened, too, the corpse of the dead man floating, glassy-eyed, in the water.

 

Had that same lion roaring in her ears roared in his, too?

 

He would not take her comfort, that night or the next day, afraid to meet her gaze, and nothing more was said of kissing. When they’d pulled up their wagons outside the hospital, Chaplain Hopkins had returned, but she could find no trace of Henry. “If I’ve done something,” she had begged - but he’d ignored her.

 

She knew he was still there, that frightened creature who’d come out of the river, hiding behind Hopkins’ impassive mask. She slid herself into bed, tucked her knees up close and closed her eyes, letting the vision come again, letting herself sit down upon his lap, and cradle his face in her hands, and kiss his brow, his cheeks, his eyes, until his hands remembered how to move and drew her close, heavy on her hips and the small of her back.

 

She closed her covers up tight around her shoulders, and in her mind let him complete the thing that they’d begun, ears filled, once more, with crickets and a bubbling stream, the sky above them filled with stars.

**Author's Note:**

> Do you know how hard it is to write Emma/Henry smut? 
> 
> Let me tell you - It’s hard.Especially in the wake of the trainwreck that was 2.04. So, in the absence of that, have some Emma wishing I could write Emma/Henry smut. (I feel you, Emma. I, too, would like to just let you loose on Henry, but alas, I can't write you, or him, that out-of-character.) 
> 
> I tried to wrap up a few things I felt were unresolved at the end of the episode - what happened that night after Henry left the river, what happened when Emma got home and had to face her mother, what was going on in Jane Green's head as she was watching Emma. And, you know, some of that unresolved sexual tension floating around before Henry went berserk.
> 
> Speaking of which,someone – who is not me – should consider writing this from Hopkins’ perspective.


End file.
